The Teacups’ demos on MySpace reached producer David Parker who was curating acoustic acts to perform at a craft market held in the Spiegeltent as part of the Auckland Festival AK07. Parker invited them to record at his Little Monster Studios in Oratia, which led to the album Forest Fiction (2009). It was a delightful set of songs that received a four-star review in the NZ Herald and hinted at the songwriting talents of both Chelsea and Stokes, with the trio’s harmonised voices shining over minimal accompaniment. Their growing acclaim led to support slots with José González and Cat Power.

‘Forest Fiction’ had a delightful set of songs and received a four-star review in the ‘NZ Herald’

In the meantime, Chelsea had enrolled in Elam School of Art at the University of Auckland.

“I was lonely at art school and my band mates Liz and Talita were so satiated by jazz school down the road, for music and for community,” says Chelsea. “I really didn’t have the skill set to be at music school, so I only vaguely considered it. Instead, I used the free DAW Reaper and a Casio keyboard to see what I could make on my own. It was extremely elementary compared to what Liz and Talita were doing and the severe contrast made me laugh. I was trying to be as serious as they were about the thing I loved to do and kind of failing.”

Chelsea made an EP called Activity, and for her class critique asked everyone why they thought they deserved to hear it before having a listening party. “They could have said anything and made the cut. I liked and still enjoy the concepts around delusions of grandeur. Begging for value with confidence. After the listening party I left 10 handmade copies and a donation box in my studio space. Anyone could come and take one in exchange for what they thought it was worth. There was no way to offend if you were just willing to participate.”

Finding a name

Chelsea eventually quit art school to pursue music. She recorded a solo track (‘Under’) with David Parker, which she released as Chelsea Jade, and began playing live as a duo with guitarist/producer James Duncan.

“When I started making songs with David Parker in his Oratia bedroom, the escalation from Activity was extremely impressive to me. David and James Duncan gave me my first window into refinement from my raw ideas and their ideas of what my taste was. Once you start hearing possibilities, your palette expands. Then I joined James Duncan’s live band to open for Dimmer and play the Big Day Out and he started producing some songs with me while he was working on the Punches record with Kelly Steven.”

Chelsea and Duncan played Camp A Low Hum and their duet ‘French Kissmass’ appeared on a compilation that Parker put together. Their live sets were divided between songs they  had each written as solo acts and the odd cover, including ‘No Scrubs’ by TLC. To accompany her music Chelsea experimented with a photography blog, seeking a way to introduce another element to her work. She decided to create a separate moniker for her music by releasing the song ‘Pazzida’ (co-written with Duncan) under the name Watercolours.

She gave new life to a set of unreleased demos by handing them on to different producers to reinterpret, leading to Over and Under: A Remix EP which featured Duncan, Alastair Deverick aka Boycrush, Haz Beats from Home Brew, and Jeremy Toy from Opensouls.

Her next breakthrough came through meeting Justyn Pilbrow, who had gone from being bassist/guitarist and songwriter in Elemeno P to starting out as a producer in the US.

“When James went to New York to play with Dimmer for the Chris Knox benefit, I went along and that’s where I met Justyn. He ripped something off my MySpace music page and produced it out and then we conspired for me to return to New York to work together. Justyn had a different approach to everyone else. He wanted to coax my sensibilities out and that’s when I started taking field recordings around the city to build out into songs with Justyn. My approach to a sound was very piecemeal. Like a collage. Walk around, pick up something that’s happening, if it feels exciting, pursue it. I still have trouble leaning into just one idea. I’m easily seduced by beautiful sounds, and I want to walk in tandem with all of them.”

On ‘Night Swimmer,’ her vocals floated over an insistent beat and atmospheric loops (including ones made from her own voice). The lyrics commented on the male-female dynamic in a relationship.

“And if you had his lungs you could breathe more / And if you had his tongue it would mean more / You better say it to yourself for now.”

The ‘Pazzida’ video hinted at her interest in choreography, with a short dance sequence

Her first two music videos began a fruitful creative relationship with director Alexander Gandar. ‘Pazzida’ hinted at her interest in choreography with a short dance sequence – she had studied ballet and jazz dance until her mid-teens, but found it too prescriptive. In ‘Night Swimmer’ she sat in an empty swimming pool with her arms wrapped around an ice sculpture as it melted.

Chelsea created a band, enlisting two former school friends, Jonathan Pearce (keys) and Reuben Stephens (bass) from Artisan Guns. Parker came on board as guitarist, while Stokes supplied rhythms (floor tom, tambourine), backing vocals, and trumpet. To keep the performances true to the recordings, Chelsea added loops and samples into the mix via a laptop and occasionally they played with a drummer (Alastair Deverick or Jackson Hobbs).

It was an impressive run of work. Watercolours was awarded the Critics Choice Award at the 2012 NZ Music Awards, and it led to new opportunities.

“I was working in a café in Freemans Bay and Ben Lawson from Red Bull Studios came in, he was putting together a mentor programme. He said he had my name written down and I was stoked. I was paired with Jeremy Toy who was awesome. I love what we made. The vocal production was so clean and thick. My first time in a real studio. Everyone was game for anything, and I didn’t know anything. I dragged a bit of plywood in and tap-danced a beat. I invited Jackson Hobbs from Sharpie Crows in to play drums. It was just fun. A real privilege to be in that studio with Ben, who has a great demeanour to work around and suffered a lot of bad vocal takes. Talk about a learning curve.”

Through the sessions at Pilbrow’s studio and at Red Bull, Chelsea had gathered enough songs for an album and arranged to work with Universal NZ. However she decided to split the tracks across two EPs instead. First came the Portals EP, with four of the six tracks being those she’d done at Red Bull.

Already performing by herself, Chelsea Jade now reverted to using her own name for the Beacons EP, which was built around her collaborations with Pilbrow (with beats/drumbeats supplied by Jackson Hobbs).

‘Visions’ revealed a new power to her sound and Chelsea worked with Gandar to refine the visual language of her music videos. Movement was particularly important, whether it was her body in motion or the way the camera followed her. The locations were often chosen for being contextless.

“We tried to find places with no single use. Or a place with space for misuse. Isn’t that art? I think it is. I just like places that could be anywhere in the familiar world but nowhere in particular. It represents the magic place in your mind. A room of one’s own! It’s an anti-anxiety place because nothing that makes you uncomfortable has filled in the blanks yet. I love a big empty room! Full of possibilities.

“It’s also that same idea of high-school escapism but your imagination can only work with what you’ve actually seen. I feel like that is also where the comedy becomes available. I’ve always shied away from narrative. All of the visual stuff is formal thinking. Objects and rooms making oblique implications. I also just can’t think with too much stuff around. The blank page is underrated. Trying to squeeze an observation about a feeling through the screen without having to endure any acting. I’m not a good actor but I love to perform and I really love to dance. I feel the most myself when I’m dancing. I look on myself with rare delight and curiosity when I see it back.”

“I’m not a good actor but I love to perform and I really love to dance”

Chelsea appreciated the fact that Gandar never considered any approach too “stupid or weird” and instead was happy to run with whichever ideas came up. This is also an attribute Chelsea sees in Emily Miller Sharma from fashion label Ruby, who designed and created costumes for her music videos.

“One of my favourite pictures is from the ‘Superfan’ video where I’m standing on a stool and she’s grinning up at me from the floor, measuring out trousers for stilts.”

Personal Best

In 2015, Chelsea headed off to play the CMJ Festival in New York and then on to Tokyo to perform at the Red Bull Music Academy’s Culture Fair. On the way to New York, she stopped in LA to record with expat Sam McCarthy, who already had chart success in New Zealand as half of the Kids of 88 duo.

“Sam is laser-focused and an incredible pop producer. I met him through Connor Nestor [a entrepreneur and creative from New Zealand who was based in LA]. Sam set up the session and we knocked ‘Low Brow’ out in a day. Sam showed me how direct you could be. It was illuminating. I always take the long way around and he was like, I think it’s right here actually. You’re standing on it so let’s go. Don’t overthink it. 

“[Music journalist] Martyn Pepperell had been telling me to go abroad for years. When I met Sam, it seemed possible. In 2015, I moved over and into a house with Aaron from The Naked and Famous and Maddie North of So Below. Maddie was writing a lot too. Around the same time I met Leroy Clampitt. We had judged junior Rockquest together around the North Island and then in LA I started taking a two-hour bus to his studio a couple days a week. We just knocked songs out with no agenda, it was so fun. Unbelievable to go home on the bus with something so fully formed to listen to after a day’s work.”

Chelsea enjoyed the camaraderie of collaborating with a wide variety of other acts and the chance to hear her words and melodies voiced by another artist, especially if they had more technical singing ability. “It’s incredible to hear a real singer deliver what you wrote.”

She also began to get a sense of which producers she liked working with. “I do really love a good piano player, but there’s no one thing. It’s really just a welcoming quality. Somebody who wants to be in conversation with you all day. Someone who likes a long lunch away from the computer.”

Chelsea’s co-writes include popular songs by Australian singer-songwriter Cxloe and her housemate So Below. Notably, US singer Emily Warren discovered Chelsea’s music through collaborating with her at a Songhubs event in Auckland – co-writing Chelsea’s track ‘Pitch Dark’ (with additional input from expat New Zealander Sam de Jong). When Warren went back home, she went on tour with The Chainsmokers and played them Chelsea’s music. They asked to write with her and the result was ‘You Owe Me’ which became an online hit with over 100 million streams.

Through her songwriting work, Chelsea found herself accumulating some ideas that formed the basis of her debut album.

‘You Owe Me’, written with the Chainsmokers, became a hit with over 100 million streams

“It really was a lack of agenda that got those songs made. A very underrated feeling when it comes to making a record I reckon. Just liking the process and the fondness for the work growing in real time was enough of a reason to leave everything as it was when we made it. I was absolutely willing to give them to somebody else – I always am. It doesn’t really matter to me if I sing it or not, it’s about whether it gets an extended life outside of the room it was made in. If any of them had been passed along to anyone else, I’m sure they would have changed considerably. That is not uncommon.

“About six songs in, I decided I was going to put them out since I didn’t really have a foothold in the pitching circles to have them performed by anyone else. You need a calling card to do that and I didn’t have one. A couple of other things I had written for EDM artists were close to being cut by other people but nothing real. Personal Best [Chelsea’s 2018 debut album] became my calling card. It got me meetings with publishers and into different kinds of writing rooms.”

One person who was particularly encouraging towards Chelsea over this time was Lorde, who sent her a message saying that she had to be a “lion” and finally complete her own album. Chelsea later appeared in the music video for Lorde’s ‘Mood Ring’.

Her next single was the song she recorded at her very first session with Sam McCarthy, ‘Low Brow’. Chelsea reconnected with Gandar for the music video, which was shot within the concrete structure of Silo Park on Auckland’s waterfront and showed her dancing with an inflatable tube man/ air dancer – a fan-driven windsock used by retailers or car dealerships. Chelsea then sang the bridge while being blasted with an air blower.

The pair came up with an equally imaginative vision for the follow-up, ‘Life of the Party’, using an empty warehouse as the backdrop for a minimalist dance routine, with Chelsea leading a synchronised four-piece: Liz Stokes, actor-comedian Paul Williams, and musician Siobhan Leilani (Siobhan Grace). Her fans were soon copying the dance at live shows.

‘Life of the Party’ included one of her most remarkable lines: “Got gravel embedded in my hands / caught myself falling for a concrete plan.” It was among five songs she recorded with Clampitt that appeared on Personal Best. Another was ‘Ride Or Cry’ which turned the expression “I’ll be your ride or die” on its head.

The video for ‘Laugh It Off’ showed her miming from a car going through the Waterview Tunnel

The album’s breakthrough track was ‘Laugh It Off’, a song that Chelsea wrote with producer Bradley Hale, a member of US group Now, Now. Its success was helped by another stunning video directed by Gandar, in which Chelsea mimes from a car going through the Waterview Tunnel.

Prior to the album release, Chelsea played her first show in LA and then flew to Aotearoa to be one of the headliners for the Wondergarden New Year’s Festival in Auckland. She returned for another New Zealand tour to promote the album, selling out shows in Auckland and Wellington, then heading off for half a dozen dates across the US.

Chelsea now had over a decade of music-making behind her and was aware of the limitations sometimes put on her as a female artist. She wanted to empower other artists, and arranged to curate a Songhubs Spheres event for APRA (Australasian Performing Right Association) which would encourage female identifying and non-binary music-makers to gain insights from those of a similar background. Guests included producer and Prince’s staff engineer Susan Rogers, and award-winning music producer, audio engineer and singer-songwriter Ebonie Smith, who worked with Lauryn Hill, The Roots, and Panic! at the Disco.

In 2019, Chelsea headed off across America again, opening 19 shows for US indie-rock band Muna. In 2020 she was booked for a similar sized tour with Canadian singer-songwriter Allie X, but her plans were derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Soft Spot

The Covid years were a major disruption for an artist who split her time between the US and New Zealand. Chelsea did one last push for Personal Best by releasing a video of ‘Perfect Stranger’ performed by the St Mary’s College Choir, then she considered how to approach a follow-up album.

“I decided to finish some songs that had been left alone, half made, for ages. A lot of it got over the line while I was alone in my apartment during the pandemic. I was so emotional about the whole thing. Crying on the bloody radio over it. LA was feeling righteously violent, and the sky was black with ash from the forest fires for weeks. A lot of flash bangs and helicopters and curfews. A lot of sickness. The delusional optimism LA runs on was really sucked out of the air. It couldn’t have been more different than Personal Best. I got all the sessions off everyone I had been working with and chipped away at it. I couldn’t remember how to write lyrics and Liz Stokes got on some calls with me to get me going again.

“I got to finish the record in New Zealand in the APRA room at Parachute Studios. What a godsend that was. I had friends filing in to make group vocals [guest singers included Lorde, Amelia Murray (Fazerdaze), and Alisa Xayalith (The Naked and Famous)]. Ben Lawson came in to do some engineering. It was nice. I do wonder what I would have felt like making my second record outside of a pandemic, but I guess I’ll use my third as a new barometer.”

‘Superfan’ which took extreme fandom as a metaphor for being obsessed with someone

For her birthday a couple of years earlier, she was given a studio session with Clampitt and they’d come up with a high, squeaky-voiced hook to hang a song around. This led to ‘Superfan’ which took extreme fandom as a metaphor for being obsessed with someone. Chelsea had a vision of herself wearing stilts under excessively long trousers for the music video.

“I had seen an image of somebody wearing exceptionally long trousers with no stilts inside them,” Chelsea told The Spinoff, “and it helped me to grow some connective tissue between several ideas I’d been having. I’d been hunting down exaggerated silhouettes to wear for my live show – extremely flared trousers and blazers with built out shoulders and hips, always in black. Seeing that image showing room to extend one’s legs beyond their length sparked an investigation from me as to why I was pursuing these visuals. I think it’s a common experience to inflate and deflate certain parts of yourself in company … Stilts felt like an amusing way to illustrate that feeling of blowing yourself out of proportion – and doesn’t it marry perfectly to the phrase ‘super fan’?”

The visual side of Chelsea’s work came to the fore in other ways too, with her adding ink paintings and specially designed jewellery to her merch offerings. She reconnected with Liz Stokes to film a Zoom conversation in which they each covered one another’s songs for Radio NZ and The Spinoff. In the meantime, Stokes had been sharing Chelsea’s music with her label Carpark in the US, which resulted in a record deal offer.

Finally in early 2021, Aotearoa began to open and she toured across the country, including dates at the Big Gay Out, Auckland Arts Festival, and Peachy Keen (an all-female festival in Wellington). Momentum began to build towards her next album with the single ‘Good Taste’, with an animated video by Frances Haszard.

Chelsea then expanded her own creative range by creating the video for the next single ‘Best Behavior’ largely by herself, even learning to do computer animation for the project. The main location was a hotel room in New York, with Chelsea and comedian Rose Matafeo filming themselves in the confines of the space – dancing, falling onto the beds, or moving around in the dark.

‘Optimist’ was the closest she’d come to a straight-forward love song

Chelsea pushed her digital animation, directing, and editing skills even further on the video for ‘Optimist’, which combined dance elements and underwater shots filmed by Gandar with a range of warped visions of Chelsea. It was the closest she’d come to a straight-forward love song, but she playfully undercut this theme in the lyrics “I’m gonna love you from the soft spot, where the fruit begins to rot.”

The cover of Soft Spot (2022) showed Chelsea’s face and hands in a hazy grey digital mist. It was so striking that it won her the award for best album artwork at the following year’s Aotearoa Music Awards. The album included co-writes with longtime collaborators Leroy Clampitt and Bradley Hale, and some new friends including Simon Oscroft. Thomas Powers from The Naked and Famous helped on a few songs and Chelsea returned the favour by appearing on his solo track ‘Li’.

Chelsea launched Soft Spot with a show at Union Pool in New York, where she was now living.

“About a year into the pandemic I moved into an apartment in LA that looked at a wall out of its only window, so by the end of 2021 I just wanted to be around a lot of hustle and bustle. I got my driver licence and drove across the country. The dance scene is insane there. I couldn’t be more enamoured of it. So many things happening at every level. The contemporary DIY dance scene is in incredible hands in NYC. I went to every Alexa West show I could. Kinlaw blows my mind with everything they do. As soon as I cottoned on to those two, a whole world opened up. Alexa founded a performance space called Pageant I would frequent. There was a woman in SoHo who would open her loft to works-in-progress every Sunday. You sit on the floor around the edges of the room and somebody would come in and give it hell. It’s amazing to be around that. BAM shows [Brooklyn Academy of Music] were incredible. Lincoln Center! All of it.”

Chelsea took time to develop her choreography by taking up a residency at Ocean Front Studio, but this inevitably took her away from her music for a little while.

“After Soft Spot I felt like a firm audience member. I really didn’t know what to say. I just wanted to hear and look. I got to tour with Yumi Zouma at the end of 2023 and I shook back into making mode after that. It was a great experience to return to playing alone and working out what that looked like. The following year, I got to score a play for Auckland Theatre Company and it gave me a different outlook on my production voice. I became interested in making songs again but with a completely altered tactic. More like being in the APRA writing room. Having a work room of my own. Having friends pass through instead of being the one bouncing around. After two years in New York, my partner had to return to LA to make a new record, so we came back. New York for dreaming, LA for working.”

she follows her creative instincts wherever they take her

Chelsea’s transition in the world of choreography and back again was another example of how she follows her creative instincts wherever they take her.

“I’ve never known what I’m doing, I’ve just been running at what I’m interested in. I’ve talked about this with Georgia Nott [Broods] – the feminine urge to escape being told what’s what through the ephemeral. Pop music isn’t grounded in any context, it’s fantasy being piped into your reality. It’s cinema! It’s an extension of a dance class in front of the big mirror. You can see yourself putting your all into something. I think that’s good news for the brain. When you’re sweating through your uniform in a high-school prefab, the visions really lift your spirits. If you don’t have the dialect to communicate well with the people around you, it is a salve.

“Reading was like socialising to me when I was a kid. We had just moved from Cape Town to Auckland and I didn’t know the first thing about talking to people. I think that has carried through my life. A lot of reading and very little talking led to writing. I always feel out of sorts trying to explain myself. Singing is just talking the writing aloud. Making choreography to move through life I guess.”